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Bryant U Takes Backup to the Cloud

Facing a dramatic increase in the volume of data generated on campus, Rhode Island's Bryant University is rolling out NaviSite's NaviCloud Vault cloud platform for remote storage.

All Bryant students receive IT-issued laptops, and are encouraged to use smartphones and tablets in class to collaborate with each other and faculty. In the last four years, the proliferation of devices and application endpoints required to support the tech-heavy instructional approach led to a 300 percent increase in the amount of data stored and managed by the university.

"Information is the lifeblood of a university, and the technology to manage it underpins the entire academic experience. We need to backup, protect, access and secure that data," said Chuck LoCurto, VP and CIO at Bryant, in a press release.

Bryant currently uses Actifio's Copy Data Virtualization platform for on-premise backup. To optimize security and resiliency, the institution was looking to eliminate tape back-up from its infrastructure and secure data at an offsite datacenter. The storage-as-a-service NaviCloud Vault is built on Actifio's CDS solution, with "Dedupe-Async" replication technology that reduces the amount of replicated storage a business produces without loss of the underlying data, according to the company. NaviSite also offers an end-to-end service option which includes installation, configuration and set up of the data protection schema as a part of the overall service.

"As with most organizations, we're seeing an explosive growth in data, and tape back-ups are costly, time consuming and take a while to access data to find what you're looking to use," said Rich Siedzik, director of computer and telecommunications services for Bryant, in a press release. "Our solution is now more digitized."

About the Author

About the author: Rhea Kelly is executive editor for Campus Technology. She can be reached at rkelly@1105media.com.